Sequoia National Park

Interesting facts

Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest summit in the contiguous United States, lies on the park's eastern edge, giving it nearly 13,000 feet of vertical relief.

Established on 25 September 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison, Sequoia was the second national park created in the United States, after Yellowstone.

The Giant Forest grove holds five of the ten largest trees on Earth by volume.

More than 270 caves are known beneath the park, among them Lilburn Cave, the longest in California at nearly 17 miles of passages.

Crystal Cave, a marble cave with more than 3.4 miles of surveyed passages, was discovered on 28 April 1918.

A stairway of about 350 steps, built in the 1930s, climbs to the top of Moro Rock, a granite dome reaching 6,725 feet.

Tunnel Log is a fallen giant sequoia 275 feet long and 21 feet across, through which a passage wide enough for cars was cut in 1938.

In the 1880s a utopian socialist community, the Kaweah Colony, set out to make its living by logging the forests that later became the park.

The last known California grizzly bear was killed inside the park, at Horse Corral Meadow, in 1922.

The Mineral King valley was added to the park in 1978 after the Sierra Club fought a plan by Disney to build a ski resort there.

Why it is worth it

The General Sherman Tree, somewhere between 2,200 and 2,700 years old, is the largest living tree on Earth by trunk volume — not the tallest, and not the widest, but the one that wins once you multiply height by girth across its entire 275-foot length. Numbers like that are almost beside the point standing under it; what's harder to see is how deliberately the whole species is built around disaster.

Giant sequoia cones are serotinous, meaning they stay sealed until heat forces them open. For thousands of years, that heat came from frequent, low-intensity fires that swept through the groves, cracking cones, clearing out competing brush, and exposing the bare mineral soil sequoia seedlings need to take root — while the mature trees shrugged off the flames thanks to bark that can be over a foot thick and spongy enough to insulate against real heat. Fire, for a giant sequoia, isn't a threat. It's how the species reproduces.

The complication is what a century of fire suppression did to that arrangement. With small fires kept out of the groves for decades, fuel built up on the forest floor, and starting around 2015, wildfires burning through that accumulated fuel have reached temperatures the trees never evolved to survive — hot enough, in the worst cases, to cook the seeds inside cones that would once have opened safely. Parks staff now use prescribed, deliberately low-intensity burns to try to restore the fire regime the sequoias actually need, rather than the one climate change and a century of well-meant suppression left behind.

Good to know

Most sequoia groves sit along the Generals Highway.

Best time to visit

June through September for full road access to the high-elevation groves.

Getting there

60 km from Porterville. Eastern Sierra Regional Airport (BIH) is about 97 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Sequoia National Park is a national park of the United States in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, California. The park was established on September 25, 1890, and today protects 404,064 acres of forested mountainous terrain. Encompassing a vertical relief of nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 m), the park contains the highest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet (4,421 m) above sea level. The park is south of, and contiguous with, Kings Canyon National Park; both parks are administered by the National Park Service together as Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. UNESCO designated the areas as Sequoia-Kings Canyon Biosphere Reserve in 1976.

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